Poem Suited the Occasion: Bland, Empty

Maybe inaugurations get the poets they deserve. Four years ago, Maya Angelou stirred people’s hearts with “On the Pulse of Morning.” The rock of the past, she said, gives us neither haven nor hiding place in its shadow, but we can gain strength from its weight to face our destiny. We need, she said, to live beyond the “bloody sear” of cynicism. She urged us to face our history with courage.

Angelou’s message of hope seemed to fit. Many of us felt relieved that the Reagan- Bush era had finally ended. Clinton might be cautious and compromising, but at least he’d bring some change. It was easy to resonate to her talk of new beginnings.

Four years later, the dreams of that time seem hollow betrayals.

A few weeks before the second inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, I heard an interview with poet-designate Miller Williams. An amiable, folksy guy from Arkansas, he’d probably make a decent neighbor. But he wasn’t a prophet and didn’t aspire to be.

Williams’ brief poem and bland recitation turned out to be the perfect emblem of lowered expectations. He gave us generic platitudes as he spoke of hope and history and how “we mean to be the people we meant to be,” which sounded a cut below the immortal Popeye’s, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.” Even when Williams spoke of our “believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become--just and compassionate, equal, able and free,” it rang hollow. Some of us have worked for justice; others have trampled it. Angelou acknowledged this when she spoke of slaves “arriving on a nightmare, praying for a dream.” And of “struggles for profit” that have left “collars of wastes” upon the shore of the land, “currents of debris” upon its breast. Williams just offered pious sentiment, poetry as condiment.

Yet Angelou’s elegant and challenging words would have felt strange this time. Why boost hopes if they’re just going to be dashed, or raise expectations only to see them mocked? This presidential round’s new morning brings mostly fog and miasma. Divisions between rich and poor have grown as great as at any point in America’s history. The day before the inauguration, the Justice Department announced that the percentage of our population in prison or jail has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, to become the highest in the world. While Clinton didn’t start this process or these divisions, he’s hardly fought the currents that accentuate them.

It’s tempting to say that we deserve what we get. Yet to succumb to cynicism or despair further erodes an already bleak political landscape. When the poor and alienated don’t vote, men like Newt Gingrich gain power: The pivotal 1994 congressional elections went as they did because more than half of America’s potentially eligible voters stayed home. Much as occurred when Jimmy Carter came in, far too many liberal social activists spent Clinton’s first term moping sullenly when he disappointed them instead of pushing him toward visions more just and compelling. The more we decide that political leaders will inevitably be corrupt, the more we leave a self-fulfilling void.

Clinton, more secure in his second inauguration, could have invited a poet with a keener edge, someone who would acknowledge how far America is from its promise and how much work it will take to reclaim it. Such voices have illuminated our literary culture all along, from Mark Twain to Maya Angelou to Adrienne Rich. But to the degree that they speak the truth, they’re also unsettling. One who wrote a poem for this president, this Congress, would almost have to talk of political hypocrisy and expediency.

I felt better when I turned off the TV and drove to Seattle’s Martin Luther King Day march, which wound three miles through crumbling neighborhoods far from the glitz of Microsoft and Boeing. Parents and kids, friends and strangers, people of all ages and races came together and considered their distance from the nation’s capital. Dubious about the inauguration’s hype and Clinton’s promises, participants I talked to still felt it worthwhile to keep working toward King’s dream. It was too bad, most agreed, that there was so little inspiration in the inaugural rhetoric.

It would be great if national leaders offered courage for us all, as King did. But King was a 26-year-old preacher when he first headed into Montgomery, not a Nobel Prize winner on a pedestal. Those who gave him the eloquence of prophecy were not exalted leaders but sharecroppers who registered to vote, students who integrated lunch counters and children who braved taunts and blows to go to school. People marched on the Mall in Washington, to be sure, but also in Little Rock and Memphis, Chicago and Philadelphia. If they had waited for perfect words from the national stage, they might never have begun.